What is Therapy?
When I was in grad school, people used to say, “Nobody wants to be in therapy forever.” These days, therapy has become more popular, and a lot of people think of it kind of like a gym membership — something you keep up forever, a regular workout for your emotional health. There’s nothing wrong with that idea, but I think it misses something deeper about what therapy is really meant to do.
Before we consider the flaw, let’s answer the question: what is therapy?
At the Voice of the Heart Center, we consider therapy to be a tool for a person to recover their inner world so they can give and receive the maximum amount of love and leadership over a lifetime.
Each child is born with feelings, needs, desire, longings, and hopes which are used to stay connected to people who can sustain the child’s life. Even as we age we never outgrow the need to tend to and depend upon this emotional and spiritual system - the heart.
Yet, quickly, we learn to hide our heart as to stay connected to unhealthy people, families, organizations, and societies. We become disconnected from our inherent self-worth.
When we lose our connection to ourselves, our worth becomes intermingled with the things we do, so we become disconnected with who we truly are and toxic shame takes over (toxic shame is a self-hatred that we keep experiencing a human life).
If a person loses connection with the heart then the person begins to be “tossed to and fro” instead of having a grounded experience in which my insides match my outsides.
So, therapy is a tool to uncover and recover our agency and freedom as a human being - heart, soul, mind, body, and strength.
Clinicians use different interventions and have differing styles because of their own personalities, but, at the core, good therapy is about helping someone have full expression as an individual person, so they can give and receive love. This is an emotional, spiritual, cognitive, behavioral, and physical process.
At the Voice of the Heart Center, we believe that good therapy includes:
Human to human connection. We are clinicians, but we are humans first. In other words, we know what it is like to feel stuck, helpless, or “at the end of my rope”, too.
Story focused. Each of us is living out a life story that is reenacting or reversing pains from the past until we turn and face “where we come from”. Therapy is the best tool we have to uncover the plot of a human life to gain consciousness of the story we are living.
Feedback. Every human has blind spots. Therapy is not a sounding board, but a participation in honest, kind, and thorough communication with another person.
More clarity, less control. We can’t control how life unfolds or how we’re made. But we can learn to live fully in the middle of it. Many people come to us after past therapy experiences that felt unclear or directionless, and we make it a point to bring focus and transparency to the process.
Feelings. Feelings are the doorway into the heart that leads to “the more” we are all searching for during our lifetime. Therapy that only focuses on behavior management or thinking patterns will miss the deeper waters that we actually live out of.
Spiritual. Our brain has a “landing pad” for spiritual connection with God. We will seek out spiritual connection through things we can control (substances, processes, cults, our own intellect) if we do not admit our need for spiritual connection with people we do come to trust.
Teamwork. We practice what we teach. Our clinicians rely on each other for the same honesty, support, and care we offer our clients. Living from the inside out keeps us grounded, open, and real.
So, therapy is often called the “talking cure” — a modern and effective way to help people recover their hearts. But somewhere along the way, therapy has been turned into something it was never meant to be: a religion, a cure-all, or a lifelong crutch. Our culture now treats therapy like a lifestyle or even an identity, when its true purpose is to help us rediscover our inner world so we can return to living and loving freely in the real one. When therapy becomes the end in itself instead of the means, something essential is lost — in both individuals and in our society.
Real therapy is a relationship with someone who can help you stay in the process of living — a space strong enough to hold both your deepest losses and your most fervent, often unspoken, dreams.
How long do I need to be in therapy?
Deep change is less like a workout routine and more like cultivating a new way of being — the kind that continues to strengthen long after therapy concludes.
Many people come to us for short-term help in times of crises or uncertainty. Many of these people are here for six months or less after they return to the baseline they are seeking.
Others choose to stay for longer durations for more depth of care. It takes much more time to update our body’s “software” if we have been significantly stressed (with no resources) for many years.
Jonathan Shedler a psychiatrist and researcher who reviewed many studies that looked at how long therapy takes to make a difference. He found that shorter-term therapy — around twenty to forty sessions — can create real and lasting change for many people. But when therapy continues over a year or more, the growth goes even deeper. People not only feel better by the end but often continue to improve months and even years later. Shedler explains that this happens because therapy helps build new emotional and relational capacities, not just symptom relief. In short, the longer work isn’t about dragging things out — it’s about giving the heart and mind enough time to fully heal and grow.
Jonathan Shedler found something remarkable about the way real healing happens in therapy. In many studies, people didn’t just stay well after therapy ended — they actually kept getting better. The changes that began in the therapy room continued to unfold long after the sessions were over. It’s as if the therapy relationship plants seeds that keep growing once the soil has been turned. Shedler explains that this is because good therapy sets deeper processes in motion, helping people live and love differently over time.
Real change takes time because it reaches below the surface of symptoms. Good therapy helps people grow new inner capacities — things like self-awareness, empathy, confidence, spiritual connection, and freedom to love and be loved. These are not quick adjustments; they’re slow reconnections within the heart. One formula we use to help is:
Willingness + Patience + Work + Time = Receiving the Gifts
The gifts are: Courage, Intimacy, Acceptance, Passion, Wisdom, Humility, Freedom and Forgiveness, and Joy with Sadness.
Shedler, J. (2010). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American psychologist, 65(2), 98.
Written by Colton Shannon, Ph.D.